A Study of Poetry by Bliss Perry (top 10 books of all time txt) 📕

Wordsworth once wrote of true poets who possessed

“The vision and the faculty divine,

Though wanting the accomplishment of verse.”

Let us venture to apply Wordsworth’s terminology to the process already described. The “vision” of the poet would mean his sense-impressions of every kind, his experience, as Goethe said, of “the outer world, the inner world and the other world.” The “faculty divine,” into which vision blends insensibly, would mean the mysterious change of these sense-impressions— as they become subjected to reflection, comparison, memory, “passion recollected in tranquillity,”—into words possessing a peculiar life and power. The “accomplishment of verse” is easier to understand. It is the expression, by means of these words now pulsating with rhythm—the natural language of excitement—of whatever the poet has seen and felt, modified by his imagination. The result is a poem: “embodied feeling.”

Browning says to his imaginary poet:

“Your brains beat into rhythm—you tell

What we felt only.”

There is much virtue, for us, in this rudely vigorous description of “the poet.” Certainly all of us feel, and thus far we are all potential poets. But according to Browning there is, so to speak, a physiological difference between the poet’s brain and ours. His brain beats into rhythm; that is the simple but enormous difference in function, and hence it is that he can tell what we only feel. That is, he becomes a “singer” as well as “maker,” while we, conscious though we may be of the capacity for intense feeling, cannot embody our feelings in the forms of verse. We may indeed go so far as to reshape mental images in our heated brains—for all men do this under excitement, but to sing what we have thus made is denied to us.

3. An Illustration from William James

No one can be more conscious than the present writer of the impossibility of describing in plain prose the admittedly complicated and mysterious series of changes by which poetry comes into being. Those readers who find that even the lines just quoted from Wordsworth and Browning throw little new light upon the old difficulties, may nevertheless get a bit of help here by turning back to William James’s diagram of the working of the brain. It will be remembered that in Chapter I we used the simplest possible chart to represent the sensory stimulus of a nerve-centre and the succeeding motor reaction, and we compared the “incoming” and “out-going” nerve processes with the function of Impression and Expression in the arts. But to understand something of what takes place in the making of poetry we must now substitute for our first diagram the slightly more complicated one which William James employs to represent, not those lower nerve-centres which “act from present sensational stimuli alone,” but the hemispheres of the human brain which “act from considerations.” [Footnote: Psychology, Briefer Course, pp. 97, 98. Henry Holt.] Considerations are images constructed out of past experience, they are reproductions of what has been felt or witnessed.

“They are, in short, remote sensations; and the main difference

between the hemisphereless animal and the whole one may be concisely

expressed by saying that _the one obeys absent, the other only present,

objects. The hemispheres would then seem to be the chief seat of

memory._”

Then follows the accompanying diagram and illustration.

“If we liken the nervous currents to electric currents, we can compare

the nervous system, C, below the hemispheres to a direct circuit from

sense-organ to muscle along the line S… C… M. The hemisphere, H,

adds the long circuit or loop-line through which the current may pass

when for any reason the direct line is not used.

[Illustration: M ?–— C ?–— H ?–— C ?–- S ]

“Thus, a tired wayfarer on a hot day throws himself on the damp earth

beneath a maple-tree. The sensations of delicious rest and coolness

pouring themselves through the direct line would naturally discharge

into the muscles of complete extension: he would abandon himself to the

dangerous repose. But the loop-line being open, part of the current is

drafted along it, and awakens rheumatic or catarrhal reminiscences,

which prevail over the instigations of sense, and make the man arise and

pursue his way to where he may enjoy his rest more safely.”

William James’s entire discussion of the value of the hemisphere “loop-line” as a reservoir of reminiscences is of peculiar suggestiveness to the student of poetry. For it is along this loop-line of “memories and ideas of the distant” that poetry wins its generalizing or universalizing power. It is here that the life of reason enters into the life of mere sensation, transforming the reports of the nerves into ideas and thoughts that have coherence and general human significance. It is possible, certainly, as the experiments of contemporary “imagists” prove, to write poetry of a certain type without employing the “loop-line.” But this is pure sensorium verse, the report of retinal, auditory or tactile images, and nothing more. “Response to impressions and representation of those impressions in their original isolation are the marks of the new poetry. Response to impressions, correlation of those impressions into a connected body of phenomena, and final interpretation of them as a whole are, have been, and always will be the marks of the enduring in all literature, whether poetry or prose.” [Footnote: Lewis Worthington Smith, “The New Naivet�,” Atlantic, April, 1916.] To quote another critic: “A rock, a star, a lyre, a cataract, do not, except incidentally and indirectly, owe their command of our sympathies to the bare power of evoking reactions in a series of ocular envelopes or auditory canals. Their power lies in their freightage of association, in their tactical position at the focus of converging experience, in the number and vigor of the occasions in which they have crossed and re-crossed the palpitating thoroughfares of life. … Sense-impressions are poetically valuable only in the measure of their power to procreate or re-create experience.” [Footnote: O. W. Firkins, “The New Movement in Poetry,” Nation, October 14, 1915.]

One may give the fullest recognition to the delicacy and sincerity of imagist verse, to its magical skill in seeming to open new doors of sense experience by merely shutting the old doors of memory, to its naive courage in rediscovering the formula of “Back to Nature.” [Footnote: See the discussion of imagist verse in chap. III.] Like “free verse,” it has widened the field of expression, although its advocates have sometimes forgotten that thousands of “imagist” poems lie embedded in the verse of Browning and even in the prose of George Meredith. [Footnote: J. L. Lowes, “An Unacknowledged Imagist,” Nation, February 24, 1916.] We shall discuss some of its tenets later, but it should be noted at this point that the radical deficiency of imagist verse, as such, is in its lack of general ideas. Much of it might have been written by an infinitely sensitive decapitated frog. It is “hemisphereless” poetry.

4. The Poet and Other Men

The mere physical vision of the poet may or may not be any keener than the vision of other men. There is an infinite variety in the bodily endowments of habitual verse-makers: there have been near-sighted poets like Tennyson, far-sighted poets like Wordsworth, and, in the well-known case of Robert Browning, a poet conveniently far-sighted in one eye and near-sighted in the other! No doubt the life-long practice of observing and recording natural phenomena sharpens the sense of poets, as it does the senses of Indians, naturalists, sailors and all outdoors men. The quick eye for costume and character possessed by a Chaucer or a Shakspere is remarkable, but equally so is the observation of a Dickens or a Balzac. It is rather in what we call psychical vision that the poet is wont to excel, that is, in his ability to perceive the meaning of visual phenomena. Here he ceases to be a mere reporter of retinal images, and takes upon himself the higher and harder function of an interpreter of the visible world. He has no immunity from the universal human experiences: he loves and he is angry and he sees men born and die. He becomes according to the measure of his intellectual capacity a thinker. He strives to see into the human heart, to comprehend the working of the human mind. He reads the divine justice in the tragic fall of Kings. He penetrates beneath the external forms of Nature and perceives her as a “living presence.” Yet the faculty of vision which the poet possesses in so eminent a degree is shared by many who are not poets. Darwin’s outward eye was as keen as Wordsworth’s; St. Paul’s sense of the reality of the invisible world is more wonderful than Shakspere’s. The poet is indeed first of all a seer, but he must be something more than a seer before he is wholly poet.

Another mark of the poetic mind is its vivid sense of relations. The part suggests the whole. In the single instance there is a hint of the general law. The self-same Power that brings the fresh rhodora to the woods brings the poet there also. In the field-mouse, the daisy, the water-fowl, he beholds types and symbols. His own experience stands for all men’s. The conscience-stricken Macbeth is a poet when he cries, “Life is a walking shadow,” and King Lear makes the same pathetic generalization when he exclaims, “What, have his daughters brought him to this pass?” Through the shifting phenomena of the present the poet feels the sweep of the universe; his mimic play and “the great globe itself” are alike an “insubstantial pageant,” though it may happen, as Tennyson said of Wordsworth, that even in the transient he gives the sense of the abiding, “whose dwelling is the light of setting suns.”

But this perception of relations, characteristic as it is of the poetic temper, is also an attribute of the philosopher. The intellect of a Newton, too, leaps from the specific instance to the general law; every man, in proportion to his intelligence and insight, feels that the world is one; while Plato and Descartes play with the time and space world with all the grave sportiveness of Prospero.

Again, the poets have always been the “genus irritabile”—the irritable tribe. They not only see deeply, but feel acutely. Often they are too highly sensitized for their own happiness. If they receive a pleasure more exquisite than ours from a flower, a glimpse of the sea, a gracious action, they are correspondingly quick to feel dissonances, imperfections, slights. Like Lamb, they are “rather squeamish about their women and children.” Like Keats, they are “snuffed out by an article.” Keener pleasures, keener pains, this is the law of their life; but it is applicable to all persons of the so-called artistic temperament. It is one of the penalties of a fine organism. It does not of itself describe a poet. [Footnote: I have here utilized a few paragraphs from my chapter on “Poetry” in Counsel upon the Reading of Books, Houghton Mifflin Company.]

The real difference between “the poet” and other men is rather to be traced, as the present chapter has tried to indicate, in his capacity for making and employing verbal images of a certain kind, and combining these images into rhythmical and metrical designs. In each of his functions—as “seer,” as “maker,” and as “singer”—he shows himself a true creator. Criticism no longer attempts to act as his “law-giver,” to assert what he may or may not do. The poet is free, like every creative artist, to make a